sense, deep as the other is shallow.
We believe there is some connection between knowing and caring and
praying, and what happens afterwards. Otherwise we should leave the
darkness to cover the things that belong to the dark. We should be for
ever dumb about them, if it were not that we know an evil covered up is
not an evil conquered. So we do the thing from which we shrink with
strong recoil; we stand on the edge of the pit, and look down and tell
what we have seen, urged by the longing within us that the Christians of
England should pray.

"Only pray?" does someone ask? Prayer of the sort we mean never stops
with praying. "Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it," is the prayer's
solemn afterword; but the prayer we ask is no trifle. Lines from an
American poet upon what it costs to make true poetry, come with
suggestion here:--

Deem not the framing of a deathless lay
The pastime of a drowsy summer day.
But gather all thy powers, and wreck them on the verse
That thou dost weave. . . .
The secret wouldst thou know
To touch the heart or fire the blood at will?
Let thine eyes overflow,
Let thy lips quiver with the passionate thrill.

"Arise, cry out in the night; in the beginning of the night watches pour
out thine heart like water before the Lord; lift up thine hands towards
Him for the life of thy young children!"

The story of the children is the story of answered prayer. If any of us
were tempted to doubt whether, after all, prayer is a genuine
transaction, and answers to prayer no figment of the imagination--but
something as real as the tangible things about us--we have only to look
at some of our children. It would require more faith to believe that
what we call the Answer came by chance or by the action of some
unintelligible combination of controlling influences, than to accept the
statement in its simplicity--God heard: God answered.

In October, 1908, we were told of two children whose mother had recently
died. They were with their father in a town some distance from Dohnavur;
but the source from which our information came was so unreliable that we
hardly knew whether to believe it, and we prayed rather a tentative
prayer: "If the children exist, save them." For three months we heard
nothing; then a rumour drifted across to us that the elder of the two
had died in a Temple house. The younger, six months old, was still with